All games zeroed! And game one of “The Ether Frontier”! Posting my in-person Daggerheart games in three different threads here… Please post accordingly so I know which game you’re commenting on. 🙏 One thing I’ve noticed is that emergent/proactive play is pretty streamlined in the Daggerheart system during world-building and character creation. I’m also taking some of my lessons learned from previous campaigns since reading the PARP guide and gauging ahead of time how proactive and goal-oriented the players want the campaign to be. That means these three different campaigns may have varying levels of proactive versus reactive play. Stay tuned!

Anyone running or playing Daggerheart this year? Let’s share our excitement, victories and learning experiences here.

So I recently finished reading through Jonah and Tristan’s role playing book as well as Return of the Lazy DM. Both excellent reads by the way and you should check them out as a game master, but does anyone suggest other books on running games?

While Jonah and I are proud authors of the Game Master's Handbook Series, we're occasionally also asked to contribute to our great cousin Game Master's Book series (the big hardcovers that the incomparable Jeff Ashworth originated). Next week, the Game Master's Book of Legendary Locations releases! We try not to plug too much business into the lab, but this one is such a big collaboration with tons of extremely talented people, we can't resist---writers, artists, editors, layout, and more were all amazing. If you want some inspiration for your game, consider checking it out!

Hello all, Thanks for developing a community specifically for those of us who are hoping to improve our DM skills. I'm excited to try more of a proactive and collaborative approach with my players. I think if nothing else, it'll make me a better DM. I'm a pretty narrative focused DM, in that on the GNS scale, I'm more heavily into the Narrativism than the Gamifying and Simulation. I really feel that RPGs are a form of storytelling that has a lot of advantages that other storytelling media don't. That there is a game built into the storytelling medium makes it even better. I know that this isn't for everyone, and everyone wants something different from the games they play. But with that in mind, I've lately started studying a lot about how to make my games better and more memorable for my players. Coming across the Gamemaster's Handbook for Proactive RP and the Collaborative Campaign guides was great. My favorite parts of writing adventures are the parts that direclty relate to the character arcs that the players are hoping for. While I love writing the plot and worldbuilding as a whole, the satisfying part and the part that the players are the most invested in are the parts of the world and story that directly effect their characters. On the 6th of next month, I'm going to have a session 0 for an upcoming campaign. I'll be using a lot of the guidelines set forth in the Proactive RP and Collaborative Campaign books, with my own personal twist on it. I find that if you give the players absolute freedom to do anything they want in a game, then they will often do nothing. In my experience, you have to give them a seed of an idea, something to work with first, then they will go further with that than I usually would. Sitting down and asking my group "what kind of story do we want to tell? What kind of game?" would get very few answers. But if I give them a basic milleiu and setting and perhaps some themes, they will go very far with them. For my upcoming (D&D5e2024) game, I've told them that this will be taking place in a city that is occupied by an invading force. I have the name of the city (Chordfall), some of the basic geography of it (in some mountains surrounded by watchtowers) and why the city is there (sits over a series of mines that have a valuable magical resource called Echo-Iron). That is all I know about the city at this point.